The Pirate Bay was one of the of the most premier torrent website. It remained with us for more than one and half decade. Later on, Pirate Bay aka TPB went down after years of resilience to law enforcement agencies and now people are seeking for alternatives.

Is Pirate Bay Down?

If you have searched for this article then this means you have already tried the URL of TPB and its down. It was founded by a Swedish Anti-copyright Organization in 2003. From the very first day, Pirate Bay was under the radar of corporates and law enforcement agencies. Many lawsuits filed against this and the most damaging one was of 2009. In which all three key founders of this torrent website were sentenced to one-year imprisonment for copyright infringement.

It didn’t stop there. They used the hosting and networking services that provide anonymity to its users. But the plaintiffs used Google to block its thousands of URLs in search engine research pages. At last, In 2014, Swedish police raided the facility of ThePirateBay and closed down all of its servers.

Best Pirate Bay Alternatives

As a lot, many people are searching for the Pirate Bay Torrents Alternatives. We have curated a list of best available PirateBay Alternatives that are best and safe to use. You can download your favourite content from these torrent websites.

OfflineBay

The offline version of The Pirate Bay is quite amazing and wonderful torrent website. OfflineBay comes as the best alternative to the users of TPB. This is an offline version of Pirate Bay that you can download on any operating system including Windows, Mac and Linux. This software is not a complete torrent site but an offline cache of the original website. This software is developed using NodeJS and its open source to allow other developers around the globe to contribute.

ExtraTorrent

This is the most favourite torrent community on the Internet. This is a multi-niche torrent website that harbors millions of different kind of torrents. Its active community always provides you the real insights to the life and quality of the torrents. Extratorrent provides its exclusive VPN client to avoid the IPSs from banning you and law enforcement agencies to take any legal action against you. User Interface of this website looks old but its simple and easy to use. You also get to read the latest torrent news on this website.

RARBG

Magnet links supporting torrent site comes to life in 2008. You can movies Operating System distributions along with movies, music, books and software on this website. The user interface of this website is very clean and easy to use. This website uses clickbait download buttons and pop-up ads that are quite annoying. So you might want to use the ad-blockers as well. You can also read the latest news stories related to movies and TV series on this website which includes news about casts and release of trailers.

Katcr.co

This is the clone of the original KickAss torrent website which was taken down by the authorities a few years ago. The interface is completely the same and no one can guess that this is not the original one. But because there is no official statement from the original team of Kickass torrents, we tend to believe that this is a nice alternative to The Pirate Bay with a mask of KickAss Torrents. The best thing about this TPB alternate is the way to browse the website and also the availability to see the latest torrents added to their website.

YTS.AG

YTS.AG is a movies-exclusive torrent website. This allows to you search and download movies in best available prints including 720P and 1080P. You can also choose from the DVDRip and Blu-Ray format. Movies are categorized here as per their genre, year of release as well as ranking. Overall this gives a wonderful experience to movie lovers who love to enjoy free movies. YTS.AG changes its domain names due to the fear of Law enforcement agencies although it doesn’t host any content by themselves. But you can always find the latest domain of YTS.AG just by Google search.

AIO Search

AIO Search is among the most search engines of Torrent web sphere. Just like Google, through AIO Search you can search for your torrents in multiple websites altogether. The Search Engine Result Page is also beautiful and very user-friendly. Overall this website is completely simp,e and easy to use. You can search all sorts of torrents here including movies, games, music and software etc. There are no ads on this website which makes it more scary and difficult to understand how it earns money. So you should use the ad-blockers and VPN software.

Popcorn Time

Popcorn Time is a free torrent-based alternative to the Netflix. You can enjoy unlimited free movies using their desktop and mobile apps. Movies and TV Series are categorized into different genres. No, you don’t need any BitTorrent Client to use this application. It has a built-in system to download the torrents and watch them while they are being downloaded in your system. This utility just works like the streaming service of the torrent. It loads the movies from the different sources including YTS.AG and other torrent movie websites. You can select the quality of the movie as well among 720, 1080 and 3D as well. Subtitles are also available within the interface where you can select the language.

TorrentHounds

TorrentHounds is one of the oldest and resilient torrent communities on the Internet. It hosts 8000K files on their server which is 15k Terabytes in size. This is the most trusted website of torrent users. You can find all kind of content here including games, movies, music, software, operating systems and adult content. Due to the fear of LEAs, they are shifting their websites to a free binary channel. The guide of the binary channel is available on their website. Don’t use it if you are not sure what it is and how you are going to use it.

Lime Torrents

This is not that previous the ugly looking website anymore. These have made very wonderful enhancement in their User Interface using the material design. Due to the increased popularity of this website, there are some fake clones of this website also and the original websites warn you to stay away from them. One way to find those fake websites is that they use the pop-up ads which Lime Torrents doesn’t. Lime Torrents is famous for its torrent in anime and apps niche. You will find almost every latest anime series on this website. Make sure you have installed ad-blockers and have a secure VPN connection before heading to this website.

ISO Hunt

ISO Hunt is being continuously under the witch-hunt campaign of law enforcement agencies against the torrent websites. But yet, this website survived the 15 years and still motivated to move forward and keep providing it users with torrents they love. There is a sister website of ISO Hunt also known as the Old Pirate Bay. ISO Hunt is famous for the Anime, Software and the movies. Due to the strict regulations from the authorities, ISO Hunt is also moving to the binary channel. Details of this are available on the top of the website. One thing I must say, It is the most well-desgined torrent website ever.

Torrents

Torrents.me is more than just a torrent website. Its a complete search engine of torrents that crawls the torrent websites and bring up the content you searched for in the form of query. It is also loaded with the wonderful statistics as well which are very beautiful as well as useful if you are some sort of researcher or just love to know what other people are searching and downloading most on the internet. If torrenting if what you do on the Internet, then this can be your homepage as well. You can find the best torrent website in each niche on this website. This also shows the private trackers that are available for sign up.

Zooqle

Zooqle is a wonderful movies if you torrent movies mostly. This website comes with a beautiful homepage showing most recent and well-rated movies that you are most of the times looking for. Zooqle loads movies from the The Movie Database (TMDb). You can also find TV series on this website. TV series are organized in the form of dedicated pages. You don’t have to worry if you are looking for a specific season or episode of a season. You can directly browse it and download that portion only. Shows of Jhon Oliver are most loved and downloaded content on the Zooqle which is quite amazing.Official Website

Security and Privacy Concerns of Using Torrent Websites

Torrents download are mostly flagged as dangerous to use due to the associated risks of malware. There are very few websites that use BitTorrent and are clean in nature. Pirate Bay Alternatives that came after its shutdown was mostly loaded with Malware and phishing pages. They infected millions of users worldwide.

It is worth mentioning that even TPB Torrents was once corrupted by Malware and cookie stealing codes. Leading browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome banned this website on their platform. Twitter also flagged the links of TPB Torrent as malicious. But later on, they fixed this issue.

Malware in those websites included the Crypto and non-crypto as well. Crypto-Malware hostages your device and asks you to pay the ransom to unlock the important files in your drive. Non-Crypto Malware usually uses your device as either stepping stone for bigger crimes such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack or exploits the CPU of your computer to mine the Cryptocurrency.

Safety and security concerns of torrented files also include the modified files. Because each file moves through different users, any user can alter it and add the bug in that. This is usually in case of software packages and operating system distributions. Movie files are usually just safe to watch. Because people just watch and binding any malicious code with video files is easily detectable by the Antivirus software.

The immediate effect of these both events will be slowing down of your computer. On longer terms, this will expose you to be held for the crimes that you didn’t even commit. Preying on the host computer is what a malware do. Thus while using any torrent service, this very important to assure your security. You can do this by following ways,

Ad-Blockers and VPNs for Torrenting

Ad-blockers are helping to block the servers and links that are serving those ads to you. Some of these utilities also come with the ability to block trackers including from the social media like Facebook as well. Most of these utilities are free and you can download them from the Extensions or Add-ons marketplace of the browser you are using. Still, don’t forget to read reviews about these. Because an ad-blocker have access to every website you visit and it may or may not collects the data as well.

Virtual Private Networks cannot do much about the safety and security of your data but it is an effective tool in the Digital Identity Management. You can assure the privacy of yours using these tools. While choosing a VPN software, make sure you read a bit about the particular software.

There are several VPN software that sale out your browsing data to advertising companies and someone even worst, on the black market. So, it is necessary to choose a VPN software that has good repute in the market and no evidence of any data theft reported about particular software.

Are downloading torrents safe anymore?

Most of you might not be aware of this but there has been a sudden increase in activity when it comes to law enforcement authorities on the shutting down of torrent download sites and arresting perpetrators. Apart from this, if you happen to be engaged in torrent downloading without some added protection, then it might become dangerous for you, but that will also depend on which country you’re inhabiting at the moment.

Most countries are already dealing with so many problems that they cannot invest the time, money and effort to curb torrent-downloading activities but developed countries are where such laws are quite strict. As a solution, the best possible way to start torrenting without potentially being detected by the authorities is by using privacy protection services in the form of VPNs.

ExpressVPN, Private Internet Access VPN, and IPVanish are some of the few services that are known to help out users in remaining anonymous when browsing best torrenting sites and downloading files, so try these out and start browsing when you switch on your machine.

Should you be worried about a potential lawsuit?

Lawsuits filed are categorized under class-action suits, meaning that they are filed against groups of users who copy and distribute copyrighted materials and will have to appear in court to answer for their crimes. However, and this bit is very important so please pay close attention, some lawsuits are also targeted towards individual users.

Now, why does such a thing happen? Perhaps the party wants to make an example out of you and the hearing of a lawsuit is sufficient to prevent an individual from ever engaging in the activity.

These P2P civil lawsuits are very real and they are very scary plus more often than not, it delivers an extreme level of stress and financial burden on the blamed individual. Since the internet is an open book right now, there are a higher number of chances of you being caught.

For example, you might not have read the terms and conditions of your Internet Service Provider but here is what they might do. They might choose to release a history of your download and upload activity to potential copyright plaintiffs. In short, the more content you download and store in your local storage, the higher the chances are that you come under the radar of copyright protection groups.

How To Download Torrents?

Torrents are nothing but files of a few kilobytes without a torrent client installed on your computer. To get the actual files you want on your local storage, you will require some of the best torrent clients for a various number of supported operating systems.

Luckily for you, we recently covered a list of the popular torrent programs for three popular platforms, Windows, Mac, and Linux. For added measure, we have also included some terrific free torrent clients that support Android, because you never know when people want to move this storage to their phones.

Final Words

There are tonnes of torrent websites available on the Internet. Only a few of them have a sustainable business. Most of them are preying on your data and offering cheap services. TPB was one of the best websites based on the user’s choice. But after the legal action from multiple law enforcing authorities, we aren’t left with much choice but just to use the alternatives. Please share with us the name of your best alternative of The Pirate Bay.

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